~stef/blog/2014-05-20T13:12:08+02:00utterson v0.4//www.ctrlc.hu/~stef/blog/ep elections 20142014-05-20T13:12:08+02:00//www.ctrlc.hu/~stef/blog/posts/ep_elections_2014.htmls(I have to take a short break from forging code to share my concerns
regarding the important upcoming European elections:)

Recent developments regarding the security of the internet show a
striking resemblance to western societies apathy towards the crumbling
of basic democratic values. Looking a little closer the seeds of the
European Union started about the same time a bunch of Californian
hippies worked for the military on the internet. The idealistic spirit
of those times is a unique heritage, never before did we have a
decentralized means of communication and never before did we have such
a diverse representation in policy-making as in the European
parliament. "United in diversity" - indeed. Let's avoid the sad
corruption of the internet to a tool of oppression and keep the EP
working in the idealistic spirit of its creators.

Wins

Besides legislating on the standard parameters of toothpaste-stripes
there are few very important policy domains that point beyond the
usual 5 year horizon of the average elected EP representative. The
European Parliament has been fundamental in stopping ACTA just 2 years
ago. A battle which started long before (thanks wikileaks) the current
batch of members of the European Parliament (MEPs) took their seats.
Stopping the attempt to install EU-wide censorship - disguised as a
child porn filter - was also a success. We have a lot of hope in the
recently revised data protection regulation and just this month the
network neutrality regulation proposal got saved by a broad coalition
against the intent and interests represented by the lead rapporteur.

Losses

We lost the unitary patent battle last year - and thus also the EU
economy and competitiveness. We still have all kind of data sharing
agreements with the US. The network neutrality and the data protection
proposal by the EP will also probably go into a second round after the
elections. But the council will be smart enough to wait for the
results before committing itself to the next step (which seems to
involve the UK to veto this in the name of censorship hidden behind
the ragged excuse of child porn.) We lost the cybercrime issue as
well, vendor liability has not even been mentioned in the final
proposal. We also lost the Radio Spectrum Policy Programme, an
important initiative about the prospects of the radio frequencies
freed up by switching to digital television. Instead of opening up
parts of this liberated commons, it is auctioned away to telco
companies. With good legislation we could have created a new industry
that provides local radio-based internet services. Instead we fed the
quasi-monopolies.

Future

Among the many outstanding issues, most importantly ACTA is back on
steroids called Transatlantic Free Trade Agreement (TAFTA), a
classical FTA renamed to TTIP so it does not sound so scary. Another
concerning agreement is the Trade in Services Agreement (TISA), which
seems to be coming out of the same corner as TTIP. Similar future
challenges are the conclusions of the Data Protection and the Network
Neutrality initiatives. Data retention has just been ruled
unconstitutional by the European Court of Justice, this topic will
surely come back in the next term. The world is copying our laws,
let's make sure they are copying good stuff.

We live in exciting times, on the global level Europe has a lot of
merit. However the other global players are not interested in a strong
Europe, thus Euro-skepticism and national politics plays into our
global competitors hands. The NSA scandal is a great example of this,
as it shows weak isolated inaction in the member-states. The only
serious effort has been the more than dozen hearings on this issue in
the Civil Liberties Committee of the EP.

Euro-skeptics

As with many populists movements, the root-causes of euro-skepticism
are partly valid and quite interesting. The European institutions are
overly bureaucratic, some useless or redundant (looking at EP in
Strasbourg for example), non-transparent, undemocratic and quite
corrupt. The answer of the euro-skeptics to the broken system is quite
wrong, the tool is great we just need to take responsibility, fix it
and learn to use it! We are not living in a small isolated town,
Europe is a major player in a global competition. As such we must use
our power in a concentrated way, we must fix the problems identified
by the euro-skeptics and be a role-model for the whole world with
positive action like the rejection of ACTA or a strong Data Protection
regulation.

I see however a chance to become a skeptic myself. As with any
technology, the EP itself I believe it is neutral, what matters is who
and how uses it. If we allow the EP to degenerate by staffing it with
the corrupt political elite that fails us daily at home, then I see a
reason for skepticism myself, but still not against the institution
but its inhabitants and rules.

Villains

"United in diversity" - indeed. the European parliament has members
from 28 countries, between 170-190 parties, even if there are large
political blocks - or groups as they're called in Brussels-speak - in
the EP. There's no sign of a suffocating and anti-democratic majority
dominating the parliament, there's almost always some dissenting
splinter-group. Of course in such a diverse crowd there are also all
kinds of interests represented, mostly narrow interests. Some are
fully legitimate such as the narrow interests of Mediterranean fishers
for example are not concerns shared by a polish miner, or less legit
meddling of foreign, non-european interests like the tobacco industry,
or the US State department, Hollywood, Monsanto, or the pharma
industry, you name it. Of course the bulk of the parliament is from
dumb populist parties that have no values but lots of closely
controlled voters. But for every topic you have some kind of small
core group of representatives that is deeply engaged and informed
about the issue. Some of these core MEPs can be considered the
villains representing narrow industry or interests external to Europe.

Champions

Some representatives have a strong interest to strategically serve the
diverse European society. Issues like copyright, patents, data
protection, network neutrality have been heroically fought over by a
handful of few MEPs. These sound like quite technical matters, but
they are very much defining our environment and our daily lives. One
of the most heroic of all was Amelia Andersdotter the young Pirate MEP
from Sweden. Who although started only at half-time of her term - due
to the blocking of the french - she took on responsibility as some
kind of rapporteur for 17 issues with quite hard topics. She also
authored more than a 1000 amendments, putting her way ahead of most of
her colleagues when it comes to hard work and representing European
social interest. Other notable champions were

Ranking of MEPs

The campaigns of the leading political groups are incredibly boring,
promising populistic visions of "Jobs, Growth and Security". Let's not
get into the statistics and history game about their merits in this
regard. Instead let's look at some facts on long-term strategic
positions affecting all our society. score-ep.org ranks all MEPs based
on their voting behavior on Climate Change, Fracking, GM Crops, Arms
Trade and LGBT Issues. The presentation of this data-set is beautiful.
Much less visual, and overlapping in the Climate Change dataset I have
also prepared such a scoreboard.

Based on the input of four interests groups whose assessment of the
MEPS was available to me, this is a ranking of all MEPs serving in the
7th (currently ending) term of the EP. The four data-sets I used came
from:

Lobbyplag created an assessment based on the amendments submitted
in the civil liberties committee to the Data Protection Regulation.

CAN Europe, Sandbag and WWF Europe rates MEPs based on votes
related to climate change (this is overlapping with the
ep-score.org data).

Phillip Morris tried to influence the tobacco directive and some of
its MEP assessments have leaked to the public and thus into this
list ;)

The results: eastern countries and conservatives have the least
respect for civil liberties, long-term public good or social
benefit. On the good side the official champion is Rui Tavares, he and
his green fellows rank highest when it comes to representing the
widest interests. Personally I was expecting someone else to come out
on top, Amelia Andersdotter. Her problem, she was in the wrong
committee - Industry instead of Civil Liberties - only members of the
latter got scored by Lobbyplag. If not only the amendments of the
civil liberties but also the Industry committee would have been rated
she would've come out on top.

The top 10 MEPs

Total Score

MEP

Country

Party

2.8888

Rui Tavares

Portugal

Bloco de Esquerda (Independente)

2.8809

Jean Lambert

United Kingdom

Green Party

2.7909

Mikael Gustafsson

Sweden

Vänsterpartiet

2.6472

Jan Philipp Albrecht

Germany

Bündnis 90/Die Grünen

2.6333

Pavel Poc

Czech Republic

Česká strana sociálně demokratická

2.6174

Tarja Cronberg

Finland

Vihreä liitto

2.6166

Cornelis De Jong

Netherlands

Socialistische Partij

2.6111

Marije Cornelissen

Netherlands

GroenLinks

2.6055

Bas Eickhout

Netherlands

GroenLinks

2.5681

Rebecca Taylor

United Kingdom

Liberal Democrats Party

The bottom of this list is mostly populated by (french) conservatives.

Conclusion

So what I want to say is that, the EP is a powerful tool, there are a
lot of important issues, there are a few good people in the
parliament, they have been working hard, there's also a few corrupt
people in the parliament that have vast industry support. And then we
have the majority of the parliament who is so busy with other issues
that they have no clue, they amount to about 90-95%. These masses
follow either the champions or the villains. We must make sure that we
have more champions and less villains and that the remaining masses
are aligned with the Champs.

So please look at the rankings, go and vote, express your skepticism
of the people who brought us here, not the institutions that have been
abused. It matters. Thank you.

]]>Parltrack campaign so far2013-02-26T02:07:15+01:00//www.ctrlc.hu/~stef/blog/posts/Parltrack_campaign_so_far.htmlsTL;DR please contribute a bit to the Parltrack fund-raiser.

It's worth to look back what happened so far in the campaign, since a
lot of things happened by now and there's only 9 days left of the
campaign to fund the next year of development for Parltrack.

The launch of the lobbyplag.eu initiative is related to the data
protection regulation and is widely covered all over in the
media. They used the amendments from Parltrack to do their
analysis. The guys generously promised to donate 20% of their own
fund-raising campaign to the Parltrack campaign and are calling for
support on their site. We also have plans to work together on
automatic lobbyplag processing.

The other major event was that the french organization
La Quadrature du Net donated 1000 euros and secured not only their
right to influence Parltrack more directly (that's the perk they
choose). They also helped breaking the 2500 euro limit, guaranteeing
the basic maintenance of Parltrack for the coming year.

My friends Amelia - working in the European Parliament - and Smari -
working in Iceland -, produced awesome videos explaining why they
believe Parltrack needs your support (btw check out Amelias show
#exile6e). These videos are supported by written testimonials by
members of major European digital rights organizations:

Media coverage started of in Germany with a call for support on
netzpolitik.org - a major German blog focusing on digital rights.
EPSIplatform - a European open data/government initiative - quickly
joined in and also called for donations.

The lobbyplag campaign also covered Parltrack and our fund-raising
campaign, getting some kind mentions in articles like from Euronews.

The making of the article with Joinup was amazing. We met very
briefly at FOSDEM with Gijs (the author), and later we had a kind
of interview on IRC. I don't interface very often with journalists
who do PGP and IRC. Kudos.

I was honored when I was invited to contribute an article to
Orgzine a publication of the Open Rights Group. The first draft I
wrote became later the slideshow on parltrack/about.

A third important but much less pleasant event was when Paypal blocked
Indiegogo donations because of incoming donations hitting another 2500
euro limit mandated by European regulation. After the generous
donation by LQDN and coverage in the Orgzine and Joinup, this put a
considerable dent into the campaign. Even though the limit was lifted
quickly by kind Paypal support, the fact the campaign was blocked,
stopped all donations for a few days. Luckily Indiegogo support was
kind enough to extend the campaign by 6 more days.

As of this writing the campaign is around 2700 euros, with about 55-60
founders, there's 9 days remaining. Like with many other campaigns
where everything is decided in the last few days, I hope there will be
a rush of a few more concerned citizens in Europe and the world that
will support the further development of a free software tool that has
been so widely praised and useful as Parltrack. Every euro counts,
every repost/retweet to your peers as well. Your support is much
appreciated. Thanks.

The paris-based citizen advocacy group supports Parltrack2 with a
generous donation of 1000 Euro, not only securing their right to
influence the priorities of the upcoming development, but also a half
day of dedicated work on Parltrack for their benefit. This donation
furthermore ensures the maintenance of the basic Parltrack features
for the coming year.

La Quadrature du Net3 is one of Parltracks principal users. In fact
campaigning with La Quadrature inspired the the development of
Parltrack. LQDN however takes the next step and not only uses
Parltrack, but they also take the liberated data and build their own
awesome tools based on this, their tool Political Memory4 is an
essential resource for anyone interested how our elected
representatives relate to the fundamental rights and freedoms in the
digital context.

The advanced usage of technology and the internet by LQDN is something
that hints at the future of citizen-based advocacy for more
traditional NGOs. Parltrack is proud to have contributed to the
success of LQDN in defending freedoms.

"I would (and did) pay for supporting LQDN, their work is
essential. I'm extremely honoured by this contribution, which
enables Parltrack to explore further innovation in the citizen
advocacy realm. I hope this mutual support between LQDN and
Parltrack inspires other organisations to support the efforts of
Parltrack to empower them as well."

reflects Stefan Marsiske developer of Parltrack.

Links

About Parltrack

Parltrack is a European initiative to improve the transparency of legislative processes. It combines information on dossiers, representatives, vote results and committee agendas into a unique database and allows the tracking of dossiers using email and RSS. Most of the data presented is also available for further processing in JSON format. Using Parltrack it's easy to see at a glance which dossiers are being handled by committees and MEPs.

]]>Possible Parltrack features2013-02-13T11:07:49+01:00//www.ctrlc.hu/~stef/blog/posts/Possible_Parltrack_features.htmlsI've been maintaining a list of possible features for Parltrack if the
funding campaign hits 10.000 EUR, I'd be interested to hear feedback
and other suggestions to this list:

Monitor by subjects

Parltrack already provides listings by subjects
(e.g. Protection of privacy and data protection) but there's neither a
possibility to subscribe to any changes or new dossiers to these
listings. Also missing is currently a user interface where users can
browse and select all existing subjects. This feature would allow for
broad tracking of policy areas instead of the currently supported
dossier-by-dossier tracking.

Monitor by search phrase

Simply enter a search phrase and your email and get notified, if any
dossier appears or changes that contains this phrase in its title.

Subscription management

Visitor Trends

Display any trending dossiers or MEPs based on the visitor access
statistics. This way you can identify what or who is currently hot in
the EP.

Amendments from the 6th term

Adding also the amendments from the 6th parliamentary term between
2004 and 2009, different formats require the tuning of the scrapers to
handle also these earlier documents.

Historical view

The preservation of historical data allows to present also snapshots
from previous points in time. A nice timeline visualization is also
imaginable.

Localized Parltrack data

Parltrack currently only scrapes in English, some information is
easily scrapable also in the rest of the 22 European languages. Some
might be harder, but for NGOs it would definitely make a difference,
having this information also in their native language - especially if
we're talking about re-users of the liberated datasets.

Commenting on dossiers and MEPs

Last but not least a feature that I have been long contemplating. It
would be nice to somehow merge Pippi Longstrings, Herr Nilsson and
Parltrack into a useful bundle, creating a possibility to comment on
the legislative proposals and their procedural meta-information in one
location. The issue with this is, that a public service like this
needs a lot of moderation, and I fear that serious NGOs would not want
to trust their internal political insights and commentary with an
untrusted 3rd party like Parltrack. This feature is also the basis for
the 750 EUR perk in the campaign by the way ;)

Conclusion

So this would be an initial list of medium to big features to be
added, in addition to the site redesign and various small improvements
that come up in the mean time, with possible other yet unplanned
features to be added to this list. I expect this to occupy me for
about a year especially if we reach funding levels that allow me to
add new data sources as well.

There is also continued cooperation with NGOs reusing the Parltrack
database, like with La Quadrature Du Nets awesome Political Memory and
the just recently started Lobbyplag initiative which wants to expand
its operations beyond the Data Protection dossiers.

If you agree with all or some of these goals, please consider
supporting the current fundraising campaign by donating and making
other people aware of this initiative. If you feel some important
thing is missing let's talk about it, information and financial
feedback are both important for the future of Parltrack, thank you.

]]>parltrack20132013-01-29T03:30:24+01:00//www.ctrlc.hu/~stef/blog/posts/parltrack2013.htmls
About two years ago Parltrack started as another tool trying to get some information that was necessary at that time. Since then the amount and quality of data in Parltrack has come a long way. One year ago, I had to rewrite all the scrapers as the European Parliament upgraded their website. A couple of related tools have been developed, for example Herr Nilsson or - the most widely-known - Political Memory or memopol as we call it. Also ACTA has been defeated. I believe Parltrack contributed a small part to this success. Having recent and good data on the ground was essential for campaigning in and around the European Parliament.

I think Parltrack is a tool with lots of potential. I'd really like to find some more time to just data-mine Parltrack, which was one of my initial motivations when I started this project. As a good friend used to say: most of our work in the commons is financed by pre-accumulated wealth from the traditional system. The peculiar nature of this open data combined with free software makes it somewhat difficult to keep this project sustainable. I've tried Flattr, debated and rejected advertising, offered consulting/custom development jobs, and turns out i'm too small to be eligible for EU funding grants. Depleting resources resulted in a shift of my attention lately to other jobs, however Parltrack seems to be used quite a lot. The lack of maintenance already started showing, so to stop this degradation and to allow me to focus more on Parltrack in the coming year I started an Indiegogo campaign. If you care about freedom, datalove, kittens, puppies, or just me, go here and support this campaign. It will allow me to build more free infrastructure.

The data is possibly not complete, but gives good additional information.
If everything goes well this will be integrated into MEP and dossier views.
Until then you can change the dossier id in the url above, or replace it with
a name of a mep:

]]>Announcing Herr Nilsson2012-04-16T01:26:07+02:00//www.ctrlc.hu/~stef/blog/posts/Announcing_Herr_Nilsson.htmlsHerr Nilsson is a bot which fetches data from parltrack and imports it into a mediawiki. This helps to improve the stubs on euwiki itself.

This also allows other organizations to run their own internal wiki, which can contain private analysis and commentary. A much requested feature. All you need is a mediawiki and Herr Nilsson is setting up stubs for the dossiers of interest.

On parltrack there's now a Preferences menu in the top blue bar, where you can set the address to your mediawiki, and parltrack will automatically display a Notes link in the top blue bar, which links to the dossiers page on your own hosted wiki.

]]>Announcing Parltrack2011-07-11T02:47:49+02:00//www.ctrlc.hu/~stef/blog/posts/Announcing_Parltrack.htmlsParltrack is a free tool and the associated free database to track the law-making in the European Parliament. It

Combined information

Parltrack collects the data daily and combines the information on MEPs, progress on dossiers from OEIL, committee agendas, and vote results from the plenary minutes.
Using this data it is easy to see for example at a glance:

which MEP has taken responsibility for which dossiers,

which committee is responsible or gives opinion on which dossiers,

forecasts for next steps on dossiers in the EP and committees - including tabling deadlines for amendments,

online detailed committee agendas,

online calendar with EP and committee dates,

who are the influential MEPs related to a dossier.
There's much more possibilities in this data than the web-interface and your humble developers can ever present to you. Though we are willing to work for hire to dig deeper into this information-goldmine. ;)

Notifications

Anyone can subscribe to receive email notifications on changes on dossiers. On every dossier page, there's a link "Track this Dossier", by providing your email here you create a new notification group. If you don't specify a name of the notification group, one will be randomly generated for you. If you specify an existing notification group name, the current dossier will be added to that. After you created a notification group, you can share the link to this so other people can join in.

The Texts

Most of the documents created in the law-making process (initial, supplementary and final texts, opinions) are linked whenever available from OEIL. Most of these documents are also available on Eur-Lex (the official EU website publishing the texts) and thus are also automatically available in Pippi Longstrings from the Documents tab for dossiers. Using Pippi Longstrings you can analyse the texts and comment on them. Commenting happens by selecting the text you want to comment on. The results of pippi-analysis are also displayed as comments, from a user named Pippi Longstrings.

The Data

All data in Parltrack is available freely in various forms for anyone to use. Most of the pages have a "Download as JSON" link, all new and changed dossiers are listed in an RSS feed, changes in dossiers are also available as email notifications. Furthermore a complete DB dump as JSON is also available. All this is under the ODBLv1.0 license. Running your own instance of Parltrack is encouraged, the code is free under the AGPLv3+.

Searching

Currently search is possible for text in MEPs names, dossiers titles and IDs of final acts like "directive 2006/24/EC".